Welcome to the DSA 2026 Workshop Schedule, where cutting-edge research meets practical innovation in data science and artificial intelligence. Held at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, the two-day workshop brings together researchers, practitioners, industry leaders, and innovators to present original research, exchange ideas, and discuss emerging technologies shaping Africa's AI landscape. The programme features keynote presentations, technical paper sessions, poster presentations, and interactive discussions spanning foundational data science, Generative AI, African language technologies, responsible AI, cybersecurity, data governance, and impactful applications across healthcare, agriculture, education, finance, climate, and beyond. Explore the full schedule below and plan your participation in an engaging forum dedicated to advancing data-driven solutions for Africa.
Day |
Time |
Session Type |
Details |
Track |
SPEAKER |
|
Jul-23 |
08:00 - 08:30 | Arrival & Registration | - | - | - | |
| 08:30 - 09:00 | Opening | Welcome Remarks | - | General Chair DSA Board Chair |
General Chair, Prof. Engineer Bainomugisha DSA Board Chair, Prof. Ciira Maina |
|
| 09:00 - 09:30 | Speech | Official Opening | - | Vice-Chancellor | General Chair, Prof. Engineer Bainomugisha | |
| 09:30 - 10:30 | Keynote 1 | African Language Models: The New Frontiers' | All | Dr. John Quinn and Dr. Ernest Mwebaze, Sunbird AI | PC Chair, Dr. Godliver Owomugisha | |
| 10:30 - 11:20 | Break | Coffee Break, Group Photo and Networking | - | - | ||
|
11:20 - 13:00
|
Parallel: Paper Session 1
|
Digitizing Informal Market Negotiation: A Culturally-Aware AI Chatbot for E-Commerce in Sub-Saharan Africa |
Track A
|
Nana Dilan Kenye (University of Buea, Cameroon) |
PC Chair, Dr. Aurelle TCHAGNA
|
|
| Mapping Brick Kilns Using Semantic Segmentation of Multi-Modal Satellite Imagery | Patrick Anaku (Makerere University, Uganda) | |||||
| Hybrid Kolmogorov–Arnold Graph Neural Networks and Probabilistic Graphical Models for Retention Time Prediction in Pharmaceutical LC–MS Workflows | Farouk Zainab (AIMS Senegal) | |||||
|
Parallel: DSA Women Health fellows Session 1
|
MARISA: An Explainable AI Tool for Malaria Risk Prediction Among Pregnant Women in Rwanda | Seraphine Mukabugingo (MINEDUC, Rwanda) | ||||
| Stability Amidst Stigma: Trends and Determinants of Induced Abortion in Malawi (2015–2024) | Nissily Mushani (Maseno University, Malawi) | |||||
| Sexual dysfunction and associated factors among female government institution employees | Selamawit Girma Tadesse (Debre Tabor University, Ethiopia) | |||||
| Early-Pregnancy Maternal BMI & Stillbirth Risk in Western Kenya: Secondary Analysis of the STRiDE Study | Getrude Kasaya Anusu (AMPATH, Kenya) | |||||
| Nearly One in Two Mothers: Postnatal Depression in a Botswana Neonatal Clinic | Aone Ditirwa-Gough (University of Botswana) | |||||
|
Parallel: Paper Session 1
|
Learning Ordinal Latent Representations for Subject-Independent Parkinsonian Rigidity Estimation |
Track B
|
Okello Andrew Peters (Makerere University, Uganda) |
PC Chair, Dr. Adeleke O. Bankole
|
||
| What Happens to AI When the Lights Go Out? Infrastructure-Aware Robustness Benchmarking of Vision and NLP Models Under African Deployment Conditions | Sunday Aspita Abraham (MLC, Nigeria) | |||||
| When Synthetic Data Hurts: DCGAN Augmentation Failure Under Extreme Data Scarcity for Cassava Disease Classification in East Africa | Innocent Nyalala (SAAIL Lab, Tanzania) | |||||
|
Parallel: DSA Women Health fellows Session 1
|
Digital Innovation to Improve Intimate Partner Violence Reporting among Adolescent Girls and Young Women Living with HIV in Kisumu County, Kenya | Omollo Mevis Corrie (KEMRI/CGHR, Kenya) | ||||
| Spatial and Multilevel Determinants of Dropout from the Maternal Continuum of Care in Somaliland | Hana Mahdi Dahir (Amoud University, Somalia) | |||||
| Adverse maternal outcome in placenta previa and abruption in public hospitals of Gedeo zone, South, Ethiopia | Rediet Gido (Dilla University, Ethiopia) | |||||
| Barriers and enablers to timely access to intrapartum and postpartum care in Malawi | Liness Kataika (Kamuzu University of Health Sciences, Malawi) | |||||
| Hepatitis B Virus among delivering mothers and rate of hepatitis B Virus exposure to neonates of infected mothers in south Gondar zone, Ethiopia expose | Aynework Abebaw (Debre Tabor University, Ethiopia) | |||||
| 13:00 - 14:30 | Break | Lunch & Networking | - | - | ||
| 14:30-15:30 | Invited Talks | AI on the Edge & Resource-Constrained Environments Aviation-Grade Dataset for Data Science |
Gian Marco Iodice, Arm Ltd Jonathan Kayizzi, Uganda Civil Aviation Authority |
PC Chair, Dr. Godliver Owomugisha | ||
| 15:30-16:30 | Panel discussion | Data Scarcity, Uncertainty, and AI in African Contexts | All | Moderator: Dr. Joyce Nakatumba Nabende | Dr. Joyce Nakatumba Nabende | |
| 16:30 - 16:50 | Closing | - | - | - | ||
| 18:00-20:00 | Welcome Reception | |||||
Jul-24 |
08:00 - 08:30 | Arrival | - | - | - | |
|
08:30 - 10:00
|
Parallel: Paper Session 2 | Attention-Based and Physics-Informed LSTM Models for Interpretable Weather Forecasting |
Track A
|
Immaculate Kamusiime (Makerere University, Uganda) |
PC Chair, Dr. Godliver Owomugisha
|
|
|
Parallel: DSA Women Health fellows Session 2
|
Frugal AI & Rich Realities: Engineering Constraint-Aware Systems for Maternal Nutrition | Faith Siva (Strathmore University, Kenya) | ||||
| Multimodal Learning for Cervical Cancer Detection | Hope Emmanuel Mbelwa (The Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology, Tanzania) | |||||
| Adverse pregnancy outcome after ivermectin exposure: a systematic review and meta-analysis | Damaris Monchari Kimonge (KEMRI Wellcome Trust Research Programme, Kilifi, Kenya) | |||||
| Using Data Science to Support Maternal Health Decision-Making | Elizabeth Lubinda (Zambia) | |||||
| Parallel: Paper Session 2 | Explainable and Uncertainty-Aware Variational Graph Recurrent Neural Network for Brain Tumor Classification from MRI |
Track B
|
Bonou Bienvenu A. Eudes (AIMS Sénégal) |
PC Chair, Dr. Aurelle TCHAGNA
|
||
|
Parallel: DSA Women Health fellows Session 2
|
Socioeconomic Inequality in effective coverage of modern contraceptive use in Ethiopia | Misrak Getnet (Ethiopia) | ||||
| Laying the Foundation: Toward a Nurse-Facilitated Emotional Support Strategy for Parents of Preterm Babies | Melita Gqada (University of Western Cape, South Africa) | |||||
| Spatial variation and associated factors with home delivery after receiving antenatal care in Somaliland: SLDH | Ayan Hussien Korse (Amoud University, Somaliland) | |||||
| Predicting Synergistic Anti-fungal Combinations against Candida albicans Using machine learning | Gloria Loyce Nankoma (Makerere University, Uganda) | |||||
| Parallel: Paper Session 2 | Automated Quality Control of Rainfall Telemetry via a Luenberger Virtual Sensor |
Track C
|
Samuel Mbugua (Dedan Kimathi University of Tech, Kenya) |
PC Chair, Dr. Adeleke O. Bankole
|
||
|
Parallel: DSA Women Health fellows Session 2
|
Machine Learning application in climate and maternal and child health analysis | Cherlynn Simbiso Dumbura (CeSHHAR, Zimbabwe) | ||||
| HPV infection dynamics in AGYW in Zambia | Priscovia Sichone (Center for Family Health Research in Zambia (CFHRZ)) | |||||
| MAGEA12: From Breast Cancer Biomarker to Peptide Vaccine Target | Kevin Cissy Nabukeera (African Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Data-Intensive Sciences, Infectious Diseases Institute, Makerere University, Uganda) | |||||
| Development of an explainable Artificial Intelligence-powered clinical Decision Support System for Predicting Malaria Among Women of Reproductive Age in Rwanda using DHS, Biomarker, Demographic, Environmental, Climate, and Geographic data | Seraphine Mukabugingo (Mineduc, Rwanda) | |||||
| 10:00 - 10:30 | Break | Coffee break and Networking | ||||
| 10:30-12:00 | Panel Session | The Future of Careers and Work in the AI Era (A panel discussion of the roadmap to getting there) |
All | Moderator: Dr. Godliver Owomugisha | PC Chair: Dr. Aurelle TCHAGNA | |
|
12:00-13:00
|
Poster Session
|
Automated Early Detection of Rheumatoid Arthritis in Radiographs Using Neural Networks | Jerome Teyi (AIMS Senegal) |
PC Chair, Dr. Adeleke O. Bankole
|
||
| Low-Resource Swahili–Kalenjin Neural Machine Translation via QLoRA Fine-Tuning of NLLB-200 | Cyprian Kiplangat (Kabarak University, Kenya) | |||||
| Bridging the Language Gap in Text-to-SQL: Adapting LLMs for Chichewa in a Low-Resource Setting | John Eze (AIMS Rwanda) | |||||
| Evaluating Machine Learning Algorithms for Predicting Tuberculosis Cases in Mulago National Referral Hospital: | Ekiru Ernest Ochepa (Makerere University, Uganda) | |||||
| Few-Shot Transfer Learning for Cassava Leaf Disease Detection Under East African Field Conditions | Innocent Nyalala (SAAIL Lab, Tanzania) | |||||
| Auditing Representation in Crop Disease Benchmark Datasets Intended for Sub-Saharan African Deployment | Innocent Nyalala (SAAIL Lab, Tanzania) | |||||
| Agentic AI Framework for Uncertainty-Aware and Explainable Stroke Detection in Data-Scarce African Healthcare Settings | Bitha Omgba Junior (National Higher Polytechnic School of Doula (ENSPD)) | |||||
| Explainable Respiratory disease classification: using respiratory sound and patient’s symptom data | Hiwot Habtamu (Adama S&T University, Ethiopia) | |||||
| Leveraging Open-Source LLMs for Political Discourse Analysis in Africa: Stance and Sentiment in Malian Coup Tweets | Gedeon Gbedonou (University of Abomey-Calavi, Benin) | |||||
| Contactless fish weighing | TeegWende Zougmore (Université Nazi Boni, Burkina Faso) | |||||
| Contactless Vital Signs Monitoring via Remote Photoplethysmography for Low-Resource African Healthcare Settings | AGBAN Kokou Ezechiel (Togo Data Lab, Togo) | |||||
| Low-Resource ASR for Kalenjin: Transfer Learning and Language Model Integration | Liz Ivy Wahome (Guild Code) | |||||
| Adapting Large Language Models to Localized Domains using QLORA | William Udousoro Joseph (University of Lagos, Nigeria) | |||||
| Finding farms from orbit: low-cost detection and crop growth monitoring with Sentinel-2 for agricultural advisors | Christine van Wyk (PropelMapper) | |||||
| Validation of an Adaptive AI Clinical Decision Support System for Hypertension, Diabetes and Smartphone-Based Retinal Screening in Nigeria |
Taiwo Oyewole (Alerah Technologies Ltd) | |||||
| Human-Centred Synthetic Datasets for Behavior-Sensitive Adolescent Health Education: Lessons from Participatory Research in SSA | Rahman Sanya (Makerere University) | |||||
| Reading Made Simple, Together: A Co-Designed, Open-Source Text Simplification Pipeline for Cognitive & Learning Accessibility in East Africa |
Isaac Manzi (MbazaNLP Community) | |||||
| 13:00 - 14:30 | Break | Lunch & Networking | All | - | ||
| 14:30-15:30 | HASH Awards | Track I: Access to Comprehensive Early Pregnancy Loss Care REPAIR-AI Track II: Empowering Informed Decision-Making for Contraception ChaguoAI |
Lucy Natecho Namusonge GODFREY MBUGUA |
PC Chair, Dr. Aurelle TCHAGNA | ||
| 15:30-16:00 | DSA Awards and Closing | Awards & Closing Ceremony | General Chair, Prof. Engineer Bainomugisha |
VENUE: https://maps.app.goo.gl/Ae7NtAnb8JXyX7uB8
>> DSA 2026 Summer School Schedule
